We’re Glad You’re Here!

All around campus, every day, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows are foregoing lunch, sometimes even declining invitations to hang out with friends, and passing on that awesome vacation to the beach all in the name of progressing their research and Lehigh’s reputation as an outstanding, rigorous university. Often, they spend more hours in their labs, drafting their articles, and sweating over their dissertations than they spend sleeping. 

We want to recognize and thank them for all of their tenacity, for all of their ingenuity, and for all of their willingness to work through the failures toward success. This blog is our way of showing them how important they are to the life of Lehigh University. 

Welcome to our new Graduate Student Research Series (GSRS)! 

GSRS is a blog made by the students for the students. It is managed by an Editorial Board, a collective of current Lehigh graduate students and post-doctoral fellows dedicated to highlighting high-quality, peer-reviewed research conducted in all disciplines. 

We envision this space as a central hub for the campus community ─ and beyond ─ to learn more about all of the amazing work graduate students and post-docs are doing here at Lehigh. Our hope is to foster an inclusive and integrated research-oriented campus that celebrates all methods of research from all five of our colleges.

How is GSRS different from other publication opportunities we already have?

We know that graduate students and post-docs have many other opportunities to talk about their work. 

Here on campus, for example, researchers can have an article written about them in Lehigh News, or academic departments might periodically highlight graduate research. These outlets are valuable and important in the process of disseminating information. The GSRS can add to those outlets by providing graduate students and post-docs with the opportunity to write about their own work in a way that is meaningful and that can be read and understood by an interested, educated, non-expert audience – the exact kind of audience we often need to be able to address when engaged in outreach situations or when requesting funding. 

Off campus, of course, is the highly coveted journal article publication. Nothing can replace the importance of this. However, it is highly technical and accessible mainly to those within the discipline.    

How can you participate?

GSRS editors will solicit posts written by graduate students and post-docs, and they will work with these writers to help them share their research in a way that is blog-appropriate and accessible for the widest possible range of readers. 

However, we are also always looking for submissions from any current Lehigh graduate student or post-doctoral fellow on any kind of research in which they may be engaging ─ from the role of food in Edgar Allen Poe’s canon to how a cell copes with stress ─ we want to feature it all! 

So, if you have research that you want the campus community to know more about, you can reach out to our editors at ingsrs@lehigh.edu or submit a 1000 word draft here. 

We can’t wait to hear from you, and we sincerely hope you enjoy and make use of this new space! 

The GSRS has been made possible by the sponsorship of the Graduate Writers’ Studio; by the sage advice of Kate Bullard, Jenny Chao, and Anand Jagota from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research; and by the support of Kathleen Hutnik and Oliver Yao from Graduate Education and Life. We thank you! 

Thank you also to our inaugural Editorial Board for taking the initiative and making the GSRS a reality! 

• Shasha Feng
• Furat Mousa
• Samantha Miller-Brown
• Jonathan Paulk
• Theresa Schinkowitch
• Aarshi Singh 
• Alexis Stansfield 
• Jonathan Valenzuela
• Vamseedhara Vemuri (VamC)
• Xinyue Wang 
• Willy Das